In the field of Artificial Intelligence there is significant interest in creating computer programs that successfully mimic human conversational exchanges. Such programs would be of considerable utility as, for instance, interfaces to automated customer service query systems used to respond to routine inquiries. Such programs would also be useful in education, entertainment and marketing by providing automated routine training, as game elements and in automated telemarketing campaigns.
There is such interest in creating programs of this type that there is an annual contest to see which is currently the best. The contest, the Loebner Prize Contest, is based on a definition of thinking proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, a pioneer in the development of digital computers. Dr. Turning conjectured that if, in a conversational exchange, the responses from a computer were indistinguishable from that of a human, the computer could be said to be thinking. The Loebner Prize Contest subjects computer program to a form of this “Turning Test”. Although no program to date has come close to passing the test, significant progress has been made.
To the chagrin of many in the Artificial Intelligence community, the programs that have been most successful in the Loebner Contest, and come closest to imitating a human conversation exchange, do not try to understand human utterances in any meaningful way. Instead the most successful programs operate on a very straight forward principle known as Case Based Reasoning. This consists of simply having a large database of queries and stored responses to those queries. When asked a question, the program looks in its database for a match to that query and, if it finds one, responds with the prepackaged, associated response. By having a large enough database such programs can, under the right circumstances, appear to be responding like a real person. The winner of the 2003 Loebner Contest and currently holder of the title “most human computer program” is a software package called Jabberwock. Jabberwock has a database of about 1.8 million responses to questions. However, even with such a large database of responses the winning Jabberwock was still judged to be “probably a machine”, falling well short of passing the Turing Test.
For possible education, game and entertainment applications, what is needed is an improved chatbot, capable of more convincingly imitating participation in a human conversation than existing chatbots.